Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Victory, Defeat and the Middle East

The Middle East
is truly difficult for the Western World to understand. It seems familiar and similar, but peculiar and annoying differences keep on
popping up. For example, there are two
words existing in all languages (to the best of my knowledge) with clear
meanings: victory and defeat.
In regards to war, if your armed forces can or do take over the enemy’s
territory, you win. If you have to ask
for mercy, you lose. Every kid who ever
had a fight in the schoolyard understands that.

However, in the
Middle East, the words have become confused.
In 1948, 1956, and 1967, both Israelis and Arabs agree that the former
won and the latter lost. Since then, Lewis Caroll has taken over, i.e. a word
means what I intend it to mean. In 1973,
Egypt and Syria had to run to Russia and the UN and ask for a ceasefire
because Israel had wide open roads to Cairo and Damascus. Curiously enough, Israelis view the Yom
Kippur War as a great defeat while the Egyptians regularly celebrate the
anniversary of the great victory. In the
first and second Lebanese wars (the former officially known as Peace in the
Galilee Campaign), the Palestinians and Hezbollah were forced to retreat,
to the sea in the former case, granted while causing quite a few casualties for
the Israelis. Again, the sides seem to
view the matter inversely, with the Israelis very uncomfortable with the memory
of the conflict and the former two groups proud of their resistance.

The latest of chapter of this Go reversal
game is the most recent tit-for-tat exchange in Gaza, otherwise known as the Pillar
of Cloud operation, which ended some two weeks ago. The Palestinians objectively were extremely
unsuccessful in their goal of killing civilians while the Israeli air force
destroyed most of their planned targets with minimum collateral damage, as
civilian casualties are euphemistically called.
Predictably, Israelis are uneasy with the result while the Palestinians
are celebrating their phantom victory, i.e. the vague promise to talk about
opening borders.

Clausewitz wrote
that war is another means of diplomacy.
I suppose that the claimed victories and defeats are actual if you taken
into account the political goals of the parties. Still, as Orwell suggested, the complete
misuse of words eventually strips them of all of their meaning, especially in
the Middle East.